A joint paper with eight Enterprise Architecture and Enterprise Modelling chairs from five countries with the title "From Expert Discipline to Common Practice: A Vision and Research Agenda for Extending the Reach of Enterprise Modeling" has been accepted by the prestigious Information Systems journal "Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE"). The article can be found here.

Abstract

The benefits of enterprise modeling (EM) and its contribution to organizational tasks are largely undisputed in business and information systems engineering. EM as a discipline has been around for several decades but is typically performed by a limited number of people in organizations with an affinity to modeling. What is captured in models is only a fragment of what ought to be captured. Thus, this research note argues that EM is far from its maximum potential. Many people develop some kind of model in their local practice without thinking about it consciously. Exploiting the potential of this “grass roots modeling” could lead to groundbreaking innovations. The aim is to investigate integration of the established practices of modeling with local practices of creating and using model-like artifacts of relevance for the overall organization. The paper develops a vision for extending the reach of EM, identifies research areas contributing to the vision and proposes elements of a future research agenda.

A full paper has been accepted for presentation and publication for the IRIS Conference 2018 in Salzburg entiteled "Semantic Text Matching of Contract Clauses and Legal Comments in Tenancy Law". The authors present an innovative approach to support lawyers in the processes of contract drafting, editing and analysing. Legal comments on German tenancy law contain condensed knowledge that supports contract writers. The approach supports lawyers by providing relevant information from legal comments and practitioner books. The approach also allows to select an arbitrary length text passage of interest and displays relevant corresponding information inline. It is based on text relatedness measures, in particular tf-idf and word embeddings, and is an instance of the semantic text matching problem.

The team of Florian Matthes, consisting of Ingo Glaser, and Bernhard Waltl, has published their recent results on Named Entity Recognition, Extraction, and Linking in German Legal Documents at the 21st international legal informatics symposium (IRIS). The paper is going to be presented at the conference from 22-24 February 2018, Salzburg.

From 24th to 25th of November, the Münchner Kreis Blockchain Hackathon took place in the IBM IoT Towers in Munich. About 70 participants competed in the creation of Blockchain use cases with the permissioned Blockchain technology provided by IBM, Hyperledger Composer. After two days of modeling, coding and digging into Blockchain technology, ten teams pitched their ideas to the audience and the jury, which comprised different experts from IBM, Münchner Kreis, TU München and Deutsche Telekom.

Also, a team from the Sebis Chair, consisting out of Ulrich Gallersdörfer and Elena Scepankova, took part in the Hackathon. They proposed a solution called "Massive Munich Mobility Package", in which users can use any mobility provider they desire despite being only registered with one mobility provider. For this, Blockchain technology provides a safe space for all mobility providers to exchange data about users and journeys to calculate revenue streams and platform usage. As of the pitch and the live demo, the team "Massive Munich Mobility Platform", alongside another team, was awarded as the winner of the Münchner Kreis Blockchain Hackathon.

The team of sebis says "Thank you" to all organizers, the jury and all other teams for a great Hackathon!